If you are responsible for submitting questionnaires and information for legal directories, make sure you spend an hour catching up with yesterday’s webinar on the 2016 IP Stars research

The webinar marked the beginning of this year’s research process. Questionnaires will be available to fill in from October 1, and the rankings will be published from February next year.

Our senior researchers Jakob Schnaidt and Kingsley Egbuonu took part in yesterday’s webinar, along with Phil Cox, president of Global Law Marketing, who provided an independent perspective on completing questionnaires and handling interviews.

As well as setting out how the research works and showing examples of our questionnaires, the researchers did their best to answer a wide variety of questions that listeners sent in. These included: How do we decide who to interview? Is it better to suggest small or large clients? Is there a limit on how many attorneys can be submitted? Can quantitative information be provided? And can we do interviews in languages other than English?

If you have any questions about the 2016 IP Stars research, listening to the webinar is a good place to start. We will also be posting a FAQ based on the questions received on the IP Stars website soon.

What you think of directories

However, the webinar was not only about answering questions; we also asked some of the audience.

The first was “How important are legal directory rankings to your firm from a marketing perspective?” 34% said “Very important”, 35% said “Important” and just 4% said “Not important” while 28% said “Depends on the directory”.

Second, we asked “Where do you mention your legal directory rankings?” 24% said “Business pitch documents”, 32% said “Website”, 1% said “Email signature” and 3% “Other” while 40% said “All of the above”.

Finally, in answer to the question “Would you be interested in joining a webinar dedicated to how firms can use directory rankings in marketing?” 51% said “Yes, definitely”, 39% said “Possibly” and 10% said “No”.